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Housing and Regeneration Bill

I should like to sing the praises of new clause 32, which I think will have some backing in all parts of the House. It is all about community land trusts. The Minister will remember that in Committee we had a bit of discussion about CLTs and whether they could prosper if they were legally defined as an entity. As he knows, the purpose of CLTs is to ensure that affordable and other sub-market housing is available to people at below market rents or costs—something of which I think he would approve. That would make a great deal of sense in an environment where we are trying to do everything possible to provide low-value and affordable housing. In some areas of the country, local people are effectively priced out of the housing market because house prices are not at the national average, which is eight or 10 times salary, but are 20 times the local average salary. Community land trusts can do a great deal to assist in that regard, and new clause 32 seeks legally to define the CLTs once again. The Minister told us in Committee that it was not necessary to define CLTs, as that would not be of any great advantage to them; he said that legislation already provides for them and that they are already being created, and that that proved that the Bill did not need to address the issue of definition in any greater detail. However, I have since discovered that he is wrong. I recently visited a good CLT in Cornwall, where a group of residents have got together and have managed to purchase some land. It is called a self-built community land trust. I commend it to him; it is in the village of Rock. The Minister will be interested to hear that when I say self-built, that is what I mean. At 5.30 pm when the residents have finished work, and at the weekend, they go and build the community themselves, literally. The residents spent a full year trying to get funding for that very sound project. There was no real reason why they should not get funding; it was nothing to do with the more recent credit crunch. The reason why they could not get the funding was that no commercial organisation understood what a CLT was. That is despite the fact that the residents had the backing of their local housing association, which was trying to explain the situation. When lending societies looked at the plan they could not get their heads around it, because community land trusts are not defined anywhere in law. Along with amendment No. 151, new clause 32 would solve that problem.